Perplexity Plans Revenue Sharing Program Launch with Web Publishers Next Month

AI Chatbot Perplexity to Launch Revenue-Sharing Program for Web Publishers

Next month, AI chatbot Perplexity will introduce a revenue-sharing program for web publishers, as announced at VB Transform on Thursday. Dmitry Shevelenko, Perplexity's Chief Business Officer, revealed that this initiative will integrate advertising alongside search queries on the Perplexity platform.

“This is the first revenue-share program of its kind,” Shevelenko stated during his presentation. “If publishers contribute source input for an answer we monetize with advertising, we will share that revenue with them.”

The revenue-sharing model will apply to both the free Perplexity option and the paid Perplexity Pro service. Partners will earn a percentage of revenue for every ad displayed alongside a result, and they will receive compensation if their website is referenced in an answer.

Perplexity initially announced plans to run ads against question-and-answer results in April. Shevelenko indicated that advertising on the platform would commence “in the next quarter.”

The revenue-sharing program will kick off with "incredible top-tier publishers" and is not limited to media organizations; it is also open to individual contributors with WordPress sites or newsletters. Details regarding the first publishing partners are yet to be disclosed.

Despite its growing user base and a recent $63 million funding round that elevated its valuation to over a billion dollars, Perplexity has recently faced criticism. Forbes has filed a lawsuit alleging copyright infringement, and the chatbot has been called out for neglecting opt-out requests from Wired magazine’s robot.txt file. Reports from Nieman Labs highlighted that chatbots like Perplexity and OpenAI's ChatGPT often generate false links to information or news stories.

However, Shevelenko dismissed these criticisms, asserting that the claims of infringement are "inaccurate" and emphasized that Perplexity has always provided source links for its answers. He noted that the development of the revenue-sharing program began before the criticisms of potential opt-out violations surfaced.

“These issues of aggregation and sourcing have been around long before AI, tracing back to the first book publishers in the 17th century,” Shevelenko explained. “AI doesn't fundamentally alter these dynamics. Importantly, Perplexity does not train our own foundation model; we aren't in the business of scraping the internet for data.”